"SALT’S SAD BEAUTY", Elvira Finnigan creates art for a grieving world

Elvira Finnigan pours salt on ice boats last year for Salt Trade at the RAW:almond pop-up restaurant on the Red River.

Elvira Finnigan pours salt on ice boats last year for Salt Trade at the RAW:almond pop-up restaurant on the Red River.

Sunlight is indiscriminate. It will fall on anything. There was a sense though, on an afternoon last November in Elvira Finnigan’s Winnipeg studio, that the light was happy to be there. Pouring through the large window, it found a million places to play. Finnigan collects antique saltshakers. She must have hundreds, and each engraved crystal pattern, each ornate edge of cut glass, was lit up like a Christmas tree. The artist is turning them into cityscapes. The tallest shakers become skyscrapers, emerging from clusters of lower buildings. These tiny, sculptural cities are a mesmerizing collaboration with light.

Finnigan’s usual collaborative partner is salt. Since 2001, she has used the mineral, and its metaphoric properties, as a way to move through grief and loss. Salt crystallizes. For Finnigan, watching this process, and capturing each chemical change with the aid of time-lapse video and photography, is a way to preserve moments in time.

From 2006 to 2008, Finnigan performed the first of what she calls her Saltwatch experiments, placing an assortment of objects – an old leather-bound book, handfuls of pennies, chrysanthemum flowers – into shallow ceramic platters that she then covered with a warm salt brine, and watching, over days and weeks, as the brine evaporated. Each object was encrusted; obscured by crystal formations.

Finnigan’s crystallized objects have a strange hush about them. Watching time-lapse footage or clicking through her photographs is like witnessing a series of slow, beautiful deaths. Although lighter objects, like flowers, appear to move around the surface of the brine as it evaporates, they are eventually stilled. Shiny pennies are dimmed, submerged below a slowly forming crust. Poetic connotations abound; snow covers a battlefield, cataracts cloud an eye.

Saltwatch grew out of trauma and tragedy. Finnigan was living in Pittsburgh during the Sept. 11 attacks in New York. The collective fear and sense of loss were something she needed to reckon with. She found the aesthetics of the disaster both beautiful and horrifying, especially the images of people and objects covered by white ash. “Race, age, or the value of objects under the film of ash became indeterminate,” she says. “I tried to replicate this effect.” Salt was not a rational choice, but a metaphoric leap.

The properties and associations of salt imbue her work with layered meanings. Salt is necessary for life. It seasons, cures, preserves. It heals and acts as an antiseptic. There’s salt in our sweat and tears, and our bodies have about the same percentage of salt as the ocean. In times past, it has served as currency, travelled along trade routes, provoked wars and inspired revolution. In the Bible, salt came to symbolize purity, perfection, fidelity. And yet, too much salt kills. Is the artist orchestrating little deaths? Or is she bringing her objects to life, adding resonance and value?

Finnigan has lived a varied life. In the ’60s, she was an interior designer. Fed up with design conventions, she quit to pursue teaching. She was in Botswana, teaching art with a non-government organization, when she encountered the Kalahari salt desert. “Large herds of African animals and flocks of flamingos would come to get their year’s worth of salt,” she recalls. “It is a scene that has always stayed with me.”

Paradoxically, Finnigan has returned to domestic convention in recent years, setting tables and choosing china to accommodate the rituals of eating. In 2011, she orchestrated a tea party. Hosted by painter Diane Whitehouse, it held to tradition; cucumber sandwiches, sherry and blancmange. Afterward, Finnigan filled teacups and dishes with salt brine. In 2012, she upped the ante and arranged a feast. A group of Franco-Manitoban writers, Collectif post-néo-rielistes, read manuscripts and shared an elaborate meal at Winnipeg’s Centre culturel Franco-Manitobain. Again, Finnigan used brine to cover the dishes – along with any leftovers – leaving it all to crystallize for several months. Last winter, Finnigan collaborated with RAW:almond, Winnipeg’s pop-up restaurant on the Red River, to make a salt, ice and fur installation.

Because of such performances, Finnigan’s work is sometimes seen as social practice, or relational aesthetics, a category of art that explores human interaction and its social contexts. But Finnigan doesn’t put much weight on that term. “It is not my main motivation,” she says. “I like the blurring of art and life, but the gatherings are a means to an end. I am much more interested in what’s left behind.”

What’s left behind, in effect, is a visual feast. After two months, salt has made patterns across the table’s surface, and where brine spilled over the table’s edge, stalactites have formed. Fruit and cheese rinds look like mottled flesh, and encrusted silverware is variously laid atop plates of desiccated bread and mussel shells. Tellingly, Finnigan titled the piece Aftermath. Like a recently opened archeological site or the haunting aesthetics of a disaster, the table is otherworldly, laden with memory.

Elvira Finnigan, "Feast Table", 2013, digital image of installation

Elvira Finnigan, "Feast Table", 2013, digital image of installation

Finnigan is about to embark on a new project. In March, she will show at the University of Winnipeg’s Gallery 1C03. Curator Jennifer Gibson has paired Finnigan with Winnipeg painter Lisa Wood, who’s also interested in the passage of time and rituals around eating. Gibson has asked the artists to respond to the context of the university’s cafeteria. Finnigan will set up an ad-hoc cafeteria in the gallery, applying her usual brine treatment.

It will be a challenge for Finnigan, a formalist at heart. She often chooses materials for their opulence, and is unabashed in her appreciation of beauty. It will be a stretch to go from saltshakers to sugar packets and from china to paper cups.

But Finnigan is ready to embrace the challenge. She’s busy experimenting in her studio with plastic trays and paper plates. Already, the detritus of a bustling cafeteria has become its own eerie ghost. As in the recent attacks on Paris, Beirut and Kenya, the apparition is a painful reminder of just how fragile and temporary our casual moments can be.